ArnoldJudas Rimmer. Given how Benedict Arnold isn't that well known in the UK, that first one might just be Accidental Fridge Brilliance rather than deliberate.

Takes on a whole new level following Series X, which revealed that Rimmer's mother gave him the middle name Judas because she was a member of the Church of Judas, which believed that Judas was actually the twin brother of Jesus Christ and sacrificed his own life & reputation to help spread his brother's message of peace & compassion throughout the world, by taking his place as the one that was really crucified. She wanted her son to have those qualities and to a Brit, Benedict Arnold is the selfless loyalist who did his best to serve King and Country against the dastardly insurrectionists and insurgents. From her perspective, she didn't name Rimmer after two of the biggest traitors in history, but two noble & selfless men.

Well, no to the last one: to a Brit, Benedict Arnold is some guy from American history. Americans call him a traitor, and we aren't interested enough in American history to argue.

If his treason had been successful, that is, compelled the colonies to remain part of the Empire (at least for a while), he'd be a lot more famous on both sides of the Pond.

The Judas thing becomes interesting if you take heart to Back to Reality's idea of Lister being God; Holly brought Rimmer back to keep Lister sane, and Lister is oftentimes the last human alive. Rimmer is the closest person Lister has ever had to a brother, being his bunkmate. So in an admittedly construed sort of way, Lister is the saviour of the human race and Rimmer is his aide.

At first glance, the TV Show version of Better Than Life seems like a Lighter and Softer ripoff of the real game from the novels. But the novels mention that there was a "point 01" version that mimics the version seen in the TV series perfectly — and its blatant "things you want immediately appear" meant that there was never any chance of forgetting it was a game as well as lowering the odds of causing addiction. Such a version of the game would not be illegal, unlike the deadly Lotus-Eater Machine version, and thusly it'd still be purchasable and fine to ship along in the mail — exactly how the characters get it in the TV show.

And they never play it again, as the novel states this version becomes boring and unplayable within a few days. Although, they could just be avoiding it due to what happened with Rimmer.

Quick correction, though: the episode "Better Than Life" was broadcast September 1988; the first novel was published September 1989, so the TV version came first.

Funnier still, he uses the tactic that Lister (while temporarily insane) had recommended against the Polymorph: "One swift knee in the happy-sacks and it'll go down like anyone else!"

The similarity between the titles of Back to Reality and Back to Earth foreshadow The Reveal.

The joke in The Last Day about Silicon Heaven initially seems like just another religion joke. But when machines "die" what happens to them? They end up recycled into new machines - there might not be Silicon Heaven but there is Silicon Reincarnation.

Why would the Cat look practically like a human despite the near-infinite possibilities? The Cat race evolved in an environment designed for humans. Natural selection would encourage a shape that could handle chairs, buttons, and - eventually - velour suits.

In Red Dwarf, Back in the Red, the crew discuss the Theory of Relativity. I thought it was a bit odd that none of them knew what it meant despite their numbers including a former public schoolboy, a ship's AI and an astronavigation officer. But then I realised: in the Dwarf universe, faster than light travel is possible without using hyperspace or any other specific way of getting around the theory. So of course they wouldn't have been taught the Theory of Relativity, because in a universe where that's possible, it would almost certainly be discredited. And the ship which leads to this discussion (which is three million light years from Earth c. AD 3,000,000) is named after Einstein. — halfmillennium

There's also the possibility that none of them would have needed to know how it works. Not many people would actually know the proper mechanics behind why and how their phones, computers and cars work, so it's not that surprising that in a future where faster-than-light travel is apparently common that they wouldn't know of it at all.

In the timeframe the ship was launched, faster than light travel is impossible, it's a Jupiter mining ship suggesting the human race hasn't left the solar system, and the intended trip is several years long just for that. The only reason it eventually exceeds light speed is that it has been accelerating for 3 million years. It is essentially a huge bussard ramjet, so fuel mass isn't an issue. Hardly enough to declare the theory of relativity incorrect in universe.

One of the most famous inconsistencies in Red Dwarf is that Lister had his appendix taken out the episdode "Legion", even though it had been implied he already had it out in "Thanks For The Memory". However, his appendix was probably reconstructed along with him after the intervening episode, "DNA"!

Unfortunately, this bit of Fridge Brilliance escaped so many people that in the novel "The Last Human" (which is, admittedly, a separate continuity) it's instead claimed that Lister has two appendixes.

The Red Dwarf Programme Guide offered four other explanations:

1) When Legion claimed to be removing said object to prevent peritonitis, he was really engaging Lister's mind through an insidious illusion.

2) So confused was Rimmer by Lister's pasting six months' memories into his own that he only thought the six months included an appendectomy.

3) Lister made a mistake when working on Rimmer's mind, so that someone else's memory of the operation strayed into his mind.

4) Rob and Doug screwed up.

When Lister's body was repaired by the Nanobots to build him a replacement arm, it's possible they also rebuilt anything else that was missing so he may now have a third appendix.

I long thought that Back to Earth was a pointless addition to the series, but then it dawned on me. The boys are asking for more life. They're asking for more episodes!

This moment of Fridge Brilliance actually crosses the fourth wall: Back to Earth was effectively paving the way to get Red Dwarf back on air with new episodes. As we know now, it worked because we have Season X, so their plea worked!

The virtual reality TIV game 'Better Than Life' (as seen in the novel, and series 2 episode, sharing the same name as the game itself) is a virtual simulation that can tap into your subconscious, and make all your dreams desires come true with your sensations alluding you to think that you're physically there. The issue is, is that life is perfect for you within this simulation, so you'll never want to leave. Why would you return to real life where you couldn't get whatever you wanted just by sheer thought, after you've experienced it in the simulation game? You'd stay in that game forever. The kick of the game is, that while you're experiencing your fondest dreams and desires with whoever (and whatever) you chose, the game is actually slowly eroding and killing your mind, as you remain trapped and unable to escape. Other people from outside cannot remove you from the game by removing your headgear, because you'll die from the shock. The only way you can escape, is to WISH yourself out. But why would you?

Bit of an addition to this. In the TV episode, detailing the game, the only reason the crew DID wish themselves out was because of Rimmer's self loathing and self destructive mind, which ended up turning the game into a nightmare. Had Rimmer's dysfunctional and damaged mind not been there, if he had a good upbringing, if his peers respected him, if Holly never resurrected him, or if he never boarded Red Dwarf in the first place, Cat and Lister would have been destroyed by the game because they would never want to leave. Rimmer is more of a hero than they think, admittedly in a slightly twisted and accidental way.

Except that if that was the case, they wouldn't have needed to, because Rimmer probably wouldn't have messed up fixing the Drive Plate, so they wouldn't be three million years into the future in the vast emptiness of space with no hope of meeting anyone else.

Which is why everything went down the crapper when he left.

The novelization gives an explanation: the original BTL was like what it was in the TV show, in which your wishes were fulfilled post-haste. But the thing about it was that eventually, people got bored because they knew they were in a fantasy world and there was no effort involved. The Mark II in the novels was far more sinister, in that people didn't know they were in the game, and everything worked out in a way to obscure its involvement but caused people to waste away without realizing. So it's not really Fridge Horror in the TV show, because its lack of immersion would eventually have driven them out.

Interestingly one of the books ends exactly like this, with a version of Lister and the Cat fleeing a universe where Kryten and Rimmer are dead, only to chance upon a universe where Lister and the Cat had died playing Better than Life, because for whatever reason, Kryten and Rimmer hadn't gone into the game to rescue them.

The Cat's dream sequence in Series II. Big-Lipped Alligator Moment? Well, if humans, who are supposed to mate for life, sometimes have weird erotic dreams about random people, then the Cat, whose species if definitely non-monogamous, would have crazy irrational dreams about "relationships"!

The events in Quarantine make a lot more sense if you listen closely over the series and realize that the boys really don't like each other that much:

Kryten: You'll like them. Well, some of them. Well one of them. Maybe.

Holly: Jean-Paul Sartre said, "Hell was being locked forever in a room with your friends".

Hence why Holly brought Rimmer back: the others all dislike him so much that they don't notice that they don't really like each other, either.

Able's name in Beyond a Joke. Given the brotherhood theme of the episode, it's clearly supposed to be an allusion to the Biblical Abel, but the spelling seems off. But Able is the one who spells it A-B-L-E. It probably is Abel, but he's too zonked to spell his own name.

Season 8 ended with Red Dwarf being devoured, while Season 9 starts with Red Dwarf in perfect shape. The formerly alive Rimmer is now a hologram again. If you accept that Season 9 is set in the mirror universe, both these facts are easily explained: The rest of the crew went into the mirror universe, where the ship was fine, but left behind Rimmer. So in this universe, Rimmer would have to be a hologram. Of course, it doesn't explain why the rest of the crew is entirely absent...

Would appear to be Jossed in Series X, as Rimmer tries to take credit for saving the ship.

Lister's future self in Series 6 is a brain in a jar, but still alive, after an unspecified accident. Lister mentions to his drinking buddies in a Series 1 flashback (possibly joking) that his uncle's brain was in a jar, and that it was sad because he wasn't dead yet... And we know Lister is his own dad, and that he was a single child. So is Lister, what with pretty much being a clone, remembering memories that his dad (himself) had?

Remember, Lister also had his adoptive family, he could be referring to them.

Kryten is regarded as a Series 3 Mechanoid by its production code and motherboard, and the first time we heard of this was when he was a regular in Series 3.

Series X:

Rimmer has always blamed his failures on others, including his parents. But then in Episode 1 (Trojan), we meet Howard Rimmer, one of his brothers, who eventually turns out to be almost every bit as pathetic and useless as him. Maybe Rimmer's failings are not entirely his own fault after all... -Rellevart.

Howard has been doing the exact same thing Arnold has: Lying to his mother when he fails an exam, It's pretty likely that all the Rimmer brothers are failures, and are all being told their brothers are infinitely more successful than they are. -MRM Id AS

Backed up when the final episode of Series X shows what Rimmer's father was like — A cruel man who would destroy his own son's self-confidence just because.

Episode 6/The final episode is entitled The Beginning. This could be referring to one of several things, one of these possibly being that Rimmer takes a level in Badass during the episode, and at the end of the episode, it appears to be staying, meaning that this is possibly the beginning of a more confident and more competent Rimmer... -Rellevart.

In "The Beginning" Rimmer is shown to have a holo-message from his father that he's not to view until he's become an officer. Rimmer watches it, declaring he doesn't care what he thinks anymore. But remember the events of "Stoke Me A Kipper"? Rimmer was post-humously promoted to First Officer following his "death" - In other words, he already was an officer.

I'm afraid it's a bit more awkward than that. The Rimmer we see in Series X, unless we are told otherwise, is most likely Hologram Rimmer II, who is based on the Rimmer who died at the end of Series 8. The promotion to First Officer was awarded posthumously to Hologram Rimmer I, who was based on the Rimmer who died on Red Dwarf after failing to fix the Drive Plate 3 million years ago, and who has become the latest Ace Rimmer. So while the JMC Red Dwarf's records will state that Rimmer is indeed a First Officer, it's only a technicality, since it was not awarded to this Hologram of Rimmer. -Rellevart.

Adding to Rellevart's explanation, it gets even more awkward when you remember that the officer's medal was actually given to another Rimmer (the one who Rimmer Prime was replacing as Ace), and the possibility that Lister only gave "Rimmer" the medal and promotion for show.

No, Lister promoted Ace to First Officer of their version of Starbug. Simple as that.

The ambiguity about whether Series X's Holo-Rimmer is Rimmer I or II can actually be explained neatly if one remembers from the first series that holograms, despite being treated as electronic ghosts, are actually computer simulations. In all likelihood, especially given the general "cludge-up" nature of tech in this show, Holo-Rimmer II is an amalgamation of the recorded mental data from both the first and the second Rimmers. In other words, in terms of knowledge, memories, etc, Holo-Rimmer II can really be seen as Rimmer III (Rimmer I being Rimmer from pre-series and series I-VI, Rimmer II being Rimmer from series VIII).

Rimmer actually gives several different numbers for the times he's tried to pass the Engineering Officer's exam through the series: this seems like continuity errors, but when you think about it: given "death isn't the career handicap it used to be" for holograms, what's to say that Rimmer hasn't kept on trying to take the exam off-screen during the series, causing the number of failed tests to keep creeping up?

Trojan begins with him awaiting the results from his latest exam.

Furthermore, another reason why Rimmer's number of tests keep fluctuating is that he sometimes "discounts" certain particularly embarrassing failures; note the time in series I (II?) where he claims to have taken the astronavigation exam "nine times — ten if you count the time I had my spasm". Thing is, this ambiguous comment could refer to the Noodle Incident where he had a breakdown and wrote "I am a fish" 400 times before fainting, or to the spectacular meltdown he had on-screen in the first episode, and still discount the other.

You also have to remember that sometimes he's talking about his engineering exam, sometimes he means his astronavigation exams. So if you count both of them, he's failed at least 20 tests.

In the series 3 episode "The Last Day", Kryten calls Lister a pantheist — however, in the series 5 episode "Back to Reality", Lister is described an atheist. Seems like a continuity goof... however: faith can change. Between the bleak, sanity-grating state of Lister's present existence, and the fact Lister has twice seen religious-based tragedies by this point (discovering the bulk of the Cat People wiped themselves out fighting over a religion founded in his image, something that he clearly feels deeply guilty about, and learning that Kryten —and all androids — have been forcibly programmed to believe in a machine heaven to keep them docile and obedient, something he regards with disgust as "sick"), it's not implausible he could have given up his beliefs in God and decided there's no such thing, hence becoming an atheist.

It's also possible that people are confused, and Lister really doesn't care what anyone calls him. In practice, a pantheist might be indistinguishable from an atheist - a God that exists everywhere and in everything (even in opposing forces) doesn't really need special prayers or rites - just simple respect for the creatures you meet and the objects you use. Which Lister does, for the most part (except maybe his socks.)

Rimmer's absolute smegheaded behaviour in "Quarantine" makes even more sense when one remembers that the directly preceding episode was "Terrorform", in which Rimmer quite brutally confronted that even his crewmates, for all they aren't inclined to abandon him, think he's utterly unlikeable and repugnant. Thusly, his normal paranoia that the crew would happily replace him with a more likeable hologram if they had the chance is naturally going to be stoked higher than usual; that she's also a skilled doctor/scientist, compared to his own low-ranked blatantly useless 2nd technician, is just icing on the cake.

Why was Rimmer suddenly alive at the end of "Timeslides"? Perhaps seeing his future self appear to him in his youth made him more receptive to the similiar experience in "Stasis Leak", which led him to actually listen to his future self, and use a stasis booth to survive the accident.

Talia Garrett from Only The Good is a nun in the mirror universe. This basically means that Rimmer's initial assumption that she could be sleeping with Captain Hollister could likely be true.

In addition to being utterly incompetent, why else did Rimmer fail to fix the drive plate properly? Because Second Technician on the Dwarf seems to more involve fixing vending machines than it did critical engine parts. His job probably wasn't even fully appropriate.

Why does drunken Lister record a message for himself in "Suns and Fathers" instructing himself to enrol in the Robotics course, specifically? Because Lister has a natural knack for robotics! Think about it; in the interim between the end of series II and series III, he manages to almost fully restore Kryten after Kryten crashes into an asteroid. True his programming resets, his accent changes and his looks are slightly different, but Lister has absolutely no formal training in mechanical repair of that level — he's just barely qualified, officially, to clean gunk out of soup-dispenser nozzles — and, making things even more impressive, Kryten was built about fifty years after the initial Red Dwarf disaster, as he notes in the "Back in the Red" three-parter. Then, in series V's "Terrorform", Lister is able to salvage Kryten and get him back to full operational capacity after he's crushed under a collapsed Starbug. Lister could be a pretty good Robotics engineer if he could put the effort in — heck, engineering in general might be a natural talent for his, seeing as how Ace Rimmer's dimension has Lister as "Spanners", genius spaceship designer and engineer.

There's an even earlier example: In "Future Echoes", he has a pair of robot goldfish and when one malfunctions he first smacks it on the counter a bit, then flips open a panel in its side, sticks in a screwdriver, seemingly twiddles it a couple times, close it up and the fish is good as new. He mutters to himself about engineering and if you look closely, the paper he plops the wet fish down on seems to have mechanical schematics printed on it. Maybe he was actually studying, when he felt like it.

Going by the interviews we saw, it appears the Inquisitor really does allow you to judge yourself. The two who survived were the two who actually made any attempt at all to defend themselves and believed what they were saying, no matter how shallow their arguments may have seemed to us, while the two to be erased probably could have made a worthwhile argument to be saved but didn't bother. So if you can be arsed convincing yourself that you're worth sparing, you won't be.

Cat's apparent loss of character in series VIII makes a lot more sense when you remember that he was born on Red Dwarf after the majority of the cat community left on the two arks. The event of series I-VII indicate that he's never been forced to socialize with more than two or three people at a time and in series VIII, he's confronted with a ship of more than a thousand crew. Think of any cat that gets nervous around new people and multiply it.

The way Cat's personality changes as the series goes on isn't flanderization. It's Cat being tamed by Lister.

Cat was essentially a charismatic feral in the first two series. We don't know precisely how long he'd been alone except for the elderly priest, so his behavior upon meeting people was "Look how handsome I am, feed me, seeya later!" but as he got used to the crew of Red Dwarf, his personality evolved to allow them into his world for longer stretches of time, eventually becoming more dependent on them. Spend any time with a real stray cat, especially if you adopt one, and this is exactly what you see happening.

From "Future Echoes", when the aged Lister laughs at Rimmer instead of answering any of his questions about the future before vanishing. It seems like "old man Lister" just playing another prank on his old Jerkass bunkmate. But after watching "Stoke me a Clipper" you realize Lister was laughing at the irony of what lay ahead for Rimmer.

Given that it's Lister...it's probably both.

Also in "Future Echoes", Rimmer mistakes a Future Echo of Bexley - one of Lister's future twin sons - for Lister, suggesting that Bexley looks significantly like his dad. In "Parallel Universe", we meet their mo...ah...their other parent. An alternate-universe version of Lister himself. Both parents have the same genetics, save one chromosome (or maybe not, given the nature of the Parallel Universe)...no wonder the twins looked so much like dad!

In "Stoke Me A Clipper", Rimmer genuinely believes he isn't up to the role of becoming Ace Rimmer, until he sees the mass graveyard of all of Ace's previous incarnations. Only then does he become Ace. However, back in "Emohawk - Polymorph II" when the polymorph drains Rimmer of all his bitterness and negativity, it turns him into Ace. He always had the potential to be Ace; he just couldn't see past all the bad parts of himself. There's an earlier hint of this in "Out Of Time", where Rimmer elects to fight the crew's evil future selves in spite of it being a no-win situation and it's carried over to "The Beginning" where he comes up with a plan to defeat the Simulants and "Give And Take" where he takes a bazookoid to a rogue medical droid.

Holly has an IQ of 6000, so it's illogical for him to think that Rimmer is the best choice to keep Lister sane. So why did he choose Rimmer? Because it serves as punishment for failing to fix the driveplate and killing possibly thousands of people. Lister is the person that Rimmer hates out of anyone, and he would be stuck for the forseeable future with him. Plus an extremely vain cat with no regard for anything but fashion creates a perfect Hell. Holly could have secretly created more and more things designed just to torture him. The despair squid shows just how far Holly could go to make Rimmer want to kill himself. It is possible that every single alien was designed purely for Rimmer's emotional suffering.

In the 'Meltdown' episode, "Leftenant" Elvis Presley served as Rimmer's Adjutant alongside Kryten. It didn't occur to me the first time viewing it, but after having subsequently learned more about the real Presley's life, a second viewing made it all the more obvious why this was: Elvis Presley served in the army. Some remnant of that in the Wax-Droid's programming likely put him a cut above the rest of his fellow "soldiers". Likewise, that may have also explained how he survived to the point where the Dwarfers arrived. He was too well known as a musician with no regard for his military service, in essence letting him fly under the radar of the Villain Army.

The reason the two Kochanskis are so different personality wise? Is because they're from different realities.

Why was there a dog and not a female cat in the Parallel Universe, when there was a female version of each of the others? The creature they would find would be based on *whatever animal Lister tried to sneak onto the ship*. It seems that while Dave Lister preferred cats, Deb Lister was more a dog person.

There is also a meta piece of Fridge Brilliance here too. In the real world, we tend to think of cats as being female and dogs as being male. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the belief that they embody the stereotypical traits of women and men respectively. Even though Dog is still male, he is a nod towards the fact that in a world where those stereotypical traits have now been reversed, dogs are now considered to embody (what we would consider to be) feminine traits and cats embody (again what we would consider to be) masculine traits.

The nanobots rebuilt the Red Dwarf along with its entire crew. Except for Lister's universe's version of Kochanski.

They didn't rebuild Lister, either. Who knows what other crew members are lost and gone forever?

Lister was in no state to need repairs. He wasn't on Red Dwarf when it was compacted by the nanobots. Red Dwarf was rebuilt from the actual Red Dwarf, though rebuilt according to the blueprints.

Lister was also eating the white, powdery remains of the dead crew in The End. The only way the nanobots could have completey rebuilt them using the same pieces is if the nanobots searched through the sewage. That's right, half of the Red Dwarf crew had partially been ejected from the bowels of Dave Lister.

Or they just rebuilt them from different chemicals.

Also the Kochanski of that reality was married to future Lister, turns out she never returned to the ship so the nano-bots had nothing to work with.

Right. Kochanski is on Starbug, where they captured the Nanobots, the rest of the crew are recreated from the dinky dust particles that Lister missed during the "funeral" deleted scene in Episode 1. While Lister's dead cells should also be on Red Dwarf (via dandruff, or just plain natural shedding like everyone else) we can only conclude that the nanobots rebuilt the ship, taking in to account surviving crewmembers, discounting that Kochanki is from another dimension.

Rimmer was a self-serving smeghead in series one, with no regard for the lives of mechanical beings, but over time (mainly due to his experience in Rimmerworld) he'd become much more altruistic and heroic, managing to become an Ace in the end. But from series eight, the Rimmer we knew is the one from series one again. Of course, this does serve to keep him Rimmer-like.

Also qualifies as Fridge Brilliance... this Rimmer was recreated by the nanobots, so he's had none of the experiences of the hologram Rimmer. He acts like Season 1 Rimmer because he is Season 1 Rimmer.

Red Dwarf has an episode in series 3 (Timeslides) where the developing fluid for photo producing, mutates. Long story short, the plot involves the crew being able to take any photo, or even picture to some degree, protect it onto a big screen, and are able to walk through it, and enter the scene of the photo, whatever it is. Of course they aren't able to move out of the frame of the photo, so what they see is what they get. But if someone was there taking a photo of it, they could pass into it. The Fridge Horror comes from a certain photo in the episode, Rimmer enters the frame of his old dorm back in boarding school, when everyone is asleep. Rimmer wakes his child self up, with plans to improve his own future. It has an air of comedy until you realize one thing, someone was in the boys' dormitory at night, taking pictures of young boys sleeping.

Maybe the photo was created during day and Rimmer waited for night.

Also, why is the photo in Rimmer's photo collection? It wasn't him that took it, because he was asleep in the photo.

The photo might have been taken for the school's prospectus, to show parents that their sons would sleep soundly there. Rimmer could simply have sought a copy because he's in it.

In the same episode, when Rimmer returns from this he is no longer a hologram but the rest of the crew are missing. This is resolved pretty quickly by him getting killed in an explosion, but it still makes you wonder what happened to Lister, Kryten and The Cat whilst he was away.

Not quite, they all reappear and time is reset barring Rimmer being alive. They walk off shot while he's orgasming about touching everything. (Remember the infamous order for Kryten to unpack his blow up sex doll and get out the puncture repair kit?)

Also a moment of fridge brilliance - in S2, they found a malfunctioning stasis pod that allowed them to go back pre-explosion. Rimmer attempted to warn himself to get into a stasis pod, but alive-Rimmer dismissed holo-Rimmer as a stress-induced hallucination. However....If he'd encountered his holo-self as a child (due to Time Slides), he may have listened to him the second time around, resulting in a living Rimmer post-disaster. (Also likely that the alternate Lister in that ep who was married to Kochanski is the one from Out Of Time - of course the first thing he would do is go back for Kochanski. It also possibly covers the continuity change from "they never dated" to "they dated briefly")

In Legion, the titular character gives all the Dwarfers what they want...and then imprisons them. Compare this to child molesters, rapists or serial killers, and you get the idea.

The way Legion describes the facilities of his station, the existence with him would have been a literal heaven on earth, as long as they lived. Lister, and the crew, choose a very, very, slim chance at returning to a humanity who would likely view them as something of a "missing link", if they ever even find them, over that.

The scientists who were the original components of Legion stayed on the station until they all died of old age. The show doesn't specifically say so but if you think about how he treats the Dwarfers when they come by and resurrect him, the reason the scientists never left is probably because as smart and refined as he was, Legion maniacally held them hostage to maintain his own existence and unlike with the Dwarfers, was successful.

Red Dwarf practically lives on Fridge Horror, due to purposely avoiding continuity. It has a lot of moments which cannot be explained, for instance the episode Ouroboros where Lister places his baby self under a pool table for his foster parents to find, which is hinted to happen indefinitely. There are also things like the episode Out Of Time where they come across their future selves and Lister is a brain in a jar. The fact Kryten has no idea the Nova 5 crew have died until the Dwarfers come and rescue him, so it may have happened many years before. Even the first episode makes you think about everybody on the ship dying, something which is not helped when you realise the flour-like powder Lister finds is actually their decomposed bodies after a million years. There's also the development of a whole cat race during this time that could easily be somewhere on the ship (given the sheer amount of floors it has). The fact they only meet two of them is due to low budget than anything else (in addition to The Cat there is the cat priest in Waiting For God). The list goes on.

Not sure about the rest, but the Cat was the last of his species left on Red Dwarf. The others had left on holy pilgrimages to try and find Fiji to set up a fast food store (with obligatory paper hats, though the Church of Lister schismed over whether they should be blue or red hats... They were supposed to be green).

And half of them were wiped out when they crashed into an asteroid. All thanks to Lister's laundry list.

The idea that the Cat's race evolved from a single litter of kittens. That's 3 million years worth of inbreeding, folks.

SF Debris raises an interesting point in his review of "Parallel Universe", that if the female version of Lister is supposed to be exactly the same as Male Lister, this implies that his reaction to the news if he accidentally got someone pregnant would be to claim it was their fault for not taking precautions.

It's a pretty "laddish" thing to do though, at an age of 25 (in the show) and not wanting to get tied down, It may be Lister's assumption that "the pill" is taken before bouts of sexual congress (on both "Lister's"" counts. Also bareback feels better.......)

Plus you also have to bear in mind that this episode was written and aired in 1988, a time before Sex Education drilled into the minds of men that responsibly for contraception both both ways.

Still, Fem/Rimmer stands over Man/Lister and barks, "I HOPE YOU GET PREGNANT!" directly in his face. That arguably more disgustingly callous than anything Man/Rimmer has done, and we have to acknowledge the implication that both of our "heroes" would react in the same way. I just puked out a bit of my soul.

Also Lister had drunken sex with his parallel gender-flipped doppelgänger. Multiplayer masturbation or quantum incest? You decide!

Since the topic never came up before they had sex, one can only assume that Dave was indeed making exactly the same assumptions as Deb. And I'm not sure Arlene is any more callous than Arnold's delighted "Agony! This gets better and better!"

Difference is male Rimmer only showed delight in male Lister's suffering, while female Rimmer was completely callous to someone she by all rights had never actually met.

The two crews are very similar, but not exactly the same, which is why Arlene's lust for her male counterpart is so completely unrequited. Not to mention the huge difference between Cat and his counterpart.

Another piece of Fridge Horror from this episode concerns the conception itself. Lister's experience must be somewhat similar to how men get pregnant in this reality otherwise it wouldn't work. At some point during intercourse, something (a reverse sperm?) must have traveled up his penis and nested within his chest to incubate. This leads to two possibilities: the women are the dominant sex in this universe because the men all die in childbirth Alien style, or the child comes out of the back passage either whole or as some kind of egg. If its the former than maybe that is why the men are only now gaining equal rights: the ready availability of C-sections.

Can't remember how it went in the show, but in the first novel, during the future slides section, Lister's older self tells him he has two sons and six grandchildren. At the end of Doug Naylor's solo novel, Last Human, Lister and Kochanski get to making the kids, but the only other human there is Rimmer's son. There were no other women. So either Jim and Bexley slept with their half-siblings, which seems very unlikely, or their mother. Either way, yikes.

A less horrifically-squicky possibility is that they encounter more humans at some point in the future before Lister reaches his extremely advanced age to enable the species to healthily propagate without resorting to the above.

I remember Kochanski mentions her intent to find a ship with genetic engineering facilities, so they might have found one of those.

George McIntyre. After the accident in The End he would have been the last remaining sentient being aboard Red Dwarf, accelerating blindly through space on a ship full of radioactive corpses, unable to operate the controls or even touch anything. For three million years. He wasn't active when Lister was revived so we can only guess that he eventually lost his mind and was deactivated. Red Dwarf skips over this nightmarish scenario on its way to a family-friendly comedy series.

That nightmare scenario would have a large amount of Fridge Logic attached to it. One: Why would Holly keep him running if he can't do anything? Two: even if he did stay on line, couldn't he order Holly to have himself to be put into sleep mode until he was needed? Rimmer did in in the Season 6 opener. Three: technically, he wouldn't be alone, he'd have the skutters, the self-aware machinery and Holly himself. Four: If Holly had to keep a hologram running, why wouldn't he resurrect the Captain, AKA, the highest ranked person on board?

The most likely scenario is that Holly simply switched McIntyre off not long after the accident. Even when he goes completely computer senile, Holly's not malicious and would certainly fail to see any logic in keeping a hologram around surrounded by the corpses of his workmates and with no other human company around than a man frozen in stasis.

It's also possible that McIntyre's personality disc was damaged in the radiation leak and is no longer functional. So, for all intents and purposes, he died a second time.

The zombie scene from Epideme is disgusting enough, what with Lister telling a three million-year-old corpse that she can just climb into bed with him and he's hers, and enjoying it when she strips him. He thinks it's his mother.

Er, let's be accurate here: he thinks it's the woman who he is fixated upon sexually and who he conveniently ignores is apparently also his mother due to time paradox.

Back to Earth a whole metaphysical journey that ends in the viewer finding out that our universe is the result of shared consciousness of Kryten, Lister, Rimmer, and the Cat under the influence of a female Despair squid

In that reality, Series 9 aried and was the best series yet. We don't have Series 9; the closest thing to it is Back To Earth itself, and it's divisive. But that doesn't lessen the Fridge Horror; according to Kryten's logic, every dream everyone has ever had is an alternate universe. There are universes populated by people who wear underwear in embarrassing places, and universes based on nightmares. Have fun sleeping tonight.

Holoship. The fact Rimmer has to challenge an existing crew member to gain acceptance to the Holoship is the foundation of the plot, and the captain mentions the computer offers prospective challengers their best shot of victory. If Rimmer were to succeed, there is absolutely no chance in hell that he wouldn't be the next prospective challenger's best shot of winning and God only knows how short a time he'd actually get on the ship.

No time at all, probably, if his Red Dwarf replacement decided they wanted to join Enlightenment. There could be a whole series of Red Dwarf holograms deleting each other for the job until somebody like Todhunter bid for it.

Low!Rimmer from Demons and Angels and what he wants to do to Lister is initially just Black Comedy but it's a bit more chilling when you consider the fact that he's somewhere buried inside the subconscious mind of regular Rimmer.

"Yo, matey, have your tooth back" in Backwards. We see Lister punch the man in the face, with the backwards time effect indeed restoring his tooth and the man the sitting down with his newspaper as the fight starts/ends. Play the events forward and the man was sitting in the bar with his paper, minding his own business, when he got up and Lister punched him the face, knocking his tooth out for absolutely no reason at all. What a bastard.

Given that that punch and its accompanying one-liner is the final act of the "bar-room tidy" as both the Dwarfers and the show's viewers see it, this could very well be the start of the fight for the inhabitants of the Reversed Earth and, given that the Dwarfers were standing/sitting together (or easily assumed to be given their "odd" mannerisms), the proprietor ended up being perfectly justified in chewing out Rimmer and Kryten for starting the fight that, for them and their perception of time, hadn't happened yet.

The less said about Cat's bathroom break in the same episode, the better.

How does the Cat 'smell' oncoming threats when there is no air for the smell to move through, and a plexiglass windscreen between them?

The Cat's main sense is his smell, so it becomes synonymous with "sense", possibly. It could be said it subsitutes for his "sixth sense," or a hunch.

After all, the sense of smell is important enough to the cat race that their written language is based on it. It makes sense that their spoken language would attach greater importance to smell as a sense than humans would.

Add in a synesthetic link between this intuition and smell, and the result is the ability to "smell" wormholes or other space dangers.

I always wondered how his smell worked despite the ship needing to be airtight. I mean I know Starbug is built more shoddily than your average Pinto, but it must have been airtight to not suffer from explosive decompression every time it left the Dwarf.

This could be due to avalanche ionisation caused by high energy particles from these phenomena (wormholes and the like) creating electrical currents in the lobes of the Cat's brain responsible from interpreting his sense of smell. The result? Cat interprets these as smells. These particles carry more than enough energy to penetrate a tin can like Starbug.

This actually makes quite a bit more sense than you might think as The Cats race evolved on a radiation filled ship where there was quite likely quite a lot a dangerous faulty machinery or rooms with dangerous levels of said radiation it would make sense that they would evolve the ability to sense ionisation and electrical fields.

Given how the Nanobots resurrected the Red Dwarf crew in Series VIII, presumably from what ever was left of their remains, doesn't that mean the regular universe's Kochanski should have been resurrected too?

Not necessarily. Since Kochanski was already there, and if the nanobots didn't know that she was an alternate version, and given that they were smart enough to not build another Lister, they may have (and probably did) figured that there was no need to build another one.

What makes everyone so sure that the nanobots didn't recreate Kochanski? Parallel Kochanski spent most of season 8 in the tank, so presumably this universe's Kochanski spent that season doing normal "navigation officery" kind of things.

Well for one thing, it never gets brought up. It isn't until "Back in the Red: Part III" does the Captain believe that the crew did indeed die and were resurrected. Up until then, they all firmly believed that nothing had changed since they were last alive since until Lister had told them what had happened, they had no reason to think otherwise. If Kochanski had been resurrected as well, the fact that there were two of them would have convinced the crew a lot sooner.

As mentioned at the very top, Holly stated at the end of Part 3 of Back in the Red that he was the one to additionally get the Nanobots to resurrect the crew; he would then obviously have told them that it was unessecary to resurrect the original Kochanski.

In Marooned, Lister is stuck eating dog food. Why does Starbug have dog food? The quarantine against animal lifeforms was rather strict.

Rule of Funny. Anyway, technically, dog food has to be fit for human consumption.

Lister, the lowest ranking crew member, managed to sneak a cat on board. I'm sure any other crew member could sneak a dog and some dog food aboard.

Some animals are allowed aboard Red Dwarf: Lister at one point remembers watching a squirrel in the botanical gardens.

It's more likely that the regulation is against unregistered pets that don't have a vaccination record and so forth.

Could be a service dog.

In Timeslides, if Lister wanted to return back to Earth, why didn't he look in Red Dwarf's archives for a photo of Earth from sometime close to when the original accident happened? If Earth was in full frame he wouldn't have been as affected by the can't-leave-the-frame restriction.

If he tried entering a photo of Earth that was taken in space, then he would most likely wind up in space, not on the actual planet.

In "Epideme," the crew learned that planet containing the Epideme cure had been torched to get rid of the virus. This seems like something of an overreaction, considering Epideme could only inhabit one host at a time, and only take it over after killing it, meaning that it wasn't exactly a planetary threat. Since they had the cure on hand, they could have just tracked down the host and cured him, rather than taking such a radical course as burning the whole planet.

In Only the Good, when the dwarfers have to get to the medical ward to escape, Cat goes up to the biggest, toughest guy in the cafeteria, calls him his Bitch, and then tightens up his face, Because he was expected to be punched there. Cat, the ultrashallow fashion fanatic, was willing to have the thing he loved the most broken to help his friend. note And Rimmer.

Take it a step further: Rimmer actually comes back. He left behind a universe where he was captain, his dream come true, but he still comes back with the antidote to help the others. It shows just how close they've become over the course of just one season.

Even more heartwarming when you realise that since the Series 8 Rimmer is the original Rimmer resurrected, and thus has not experienced all the mayhem and adventures that led Hologram Rimmer and the Dwarfers to become friends (sort of).

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